A quantum mechanical treatment of rotating fermion systems

Wolfgang Bulla, K. Unterkofler

Kebei Jiang, Robinjeet Singh, Petr M. Anisimov +2 more

We present a full quantum mechanical picture of squeezed vacuum state generation via self-rotation in an X system. As a result, extra noise that is overlooked in semi-classical picture is found and its effect on the degree of squeezing is discussed.

Casey Berger

Quantum field theories with a complex action suffer from a sign problem in stochastic nonperturbative treatments, making many systems of great interest – such as polarized or mass-imbalanced fermions and QCD at finite baryon density – extremely challenging to treat numerically. Another such system is that of bosons at finite angular momentum; experimentalists have successfully achieved vortex formation in supercooled bosonic atoms, and have measured quantities of interest such as the moment of inertia. However, the rotation results in a complex action, making the usual numerical treatments of the theory unusable. This thesis treats systems of nonrelativistic bosons with finite angular momentum using two approaches. One approach is to determine the virial coefficients using a semi-classical lattice approximation (SCLA). Through this approach, we are able to compute the thermodynamic equation of state of the bosons for finite trapping frequency, rotation, and inter-particle interaction. The second approach uses the complex Langevin (CL) method – a method which employs an extension of the Langevin equation to complex space and circumvents the sign problem to compute the full quantum behavior of a low energy system of interacting, trapped, and rotating bosons. We examine the density and angular momentum of the system using all three methods, but the CL method in principal allows us to compute properties unique to rotating superfluids, in particular to show the formation of density singularities (so-called vortex lattices) and compute the circulation of the fluid around those vortices. This work advances our understanding of the quantum effects of rotation on ultracold bosonic gases in two different limits.

T. Kopf, D. A. Craig

Khalid Hossain, Konrad Kobuszewski, Michael McNeil Forbes +3 more

Quantized vortices carry the angular momentum in rotating superfluids, and are key to the phenomenon of quantum turbulence. Advances in ultracold-atom technology enable quantum turbulence to be studied in regimes with both experimental and theoretical control, unlike the original contexts of superfluid helium experiments. While much work has been performed with bosonic systems, detailed studies of fermionic quantum turbulence are nascent, despite wide applicability to other contexts such as rotating neutron stars. In this paper, we present a large-scale study of quantum turbulence in rotating fermionic superfluids using an accurate time-dependent density functional theory called the superfluid local density approximation. We identify two different modes of turbulent decay in the dynamical equilibration of a rotating fermionic superfluid, and contrast these results with a computationally simpler description provided by the Gross-Pitaevskii equation, which we find can qualitatively reproduce these decay mechanisms if dissipation is explicitly included. These results demonstrate that dissipation mechanisms intrinsic to fermionic superfluids play a key role in differentiating fermionic from bosonic turbulence, which manifests by enhanced damping of Kelvin waves.